Business Intelligence (BI) generally refers to software tools used to improve business enterprise decision-making. These tools are commonly applied to financial, human resource, marketing, sales, customer and supplier analyses. More specifically, these tools can include: reporting and analysis tools to present information; content delivery infrastructure systems for delivery and management of reports and analytics; data warehousing systems for cleansing and consolidating information from disparate sources; and, data management systems, such as relational databases or On Line Analytic Processing (OLAP) systems used to collect, store, and manage raw data.
There are a number of commercially available products to produce reports from stored data. For instance, Business Objects Americas of San Jose, Calif., sells a number of widely used report generation products, including Crystal Reports™, Business Objects OLAP Intelligence™, and Business Objects Enterprise™. As used herein, the term report refers to information automatically retrieved (i.e., in response to computer executable instructions) from a data source (e.g., a database, a data warehouse, and the like), where the information is structured in accordance with a report schema that specifies the form in which the information should be presented. A non-report is an electronic document that is constructed without the automatic retrieval (i.e., in response to computer executable instructions) of information from a data source. Examples of non-report electronic documents include typical business application documents, such as a word processor document, a spreadsheet document, a presentation document, and the like.
Data, commonly manifested in reports, is critical to establishing business strategies and actions. Enterprises increasingly integrate data from a number of sources, such as different databases, external streaming data feeds, and personal spreadsheets. Once this data is integrated it is difficult to determine which values in a report come from which source. In addition, it is not clear how fresh the data may be or if there are validity issues with the data source. Because of these problems, currently, the value of reports is questioned because of concerns regarding the accuracy of the underlying data.
Validation of data within a warehouse or specific data source can add some degree of confidence in the data. This validation, which may be in the form of metadata, is not passed to the report user in a clear and direct manner, so the validation information is often rendered useless in the report generation process.
Even if there are internal standards for evaluating the trustworthiness of a report, Enterprise reporting systems do not effectively link this information with a report. In addition, establishing trust for a report document is often based on the currency (i.e., timeliness) of the data and other factors that may not be possible for a user to determine.
In sum, current software solutions do not address the issue of overall trustworthiness of a report. In particular, current solutions do not meet user needs to aggregate trust levels. Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a system that overcomes the shortcomings associated with the prior art.